AO3’s Hugo Award win is a long time coming for the fanfiction community

Archive of Our Own, an online fanfiction repository run by non-profit Organization for Transformative Works, received the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Related Work. Polygon published the following story when the site first received a nomination in April.

Among the finalists for the 2019 Hugo Awards — a set of awards for achievement in science fiction and fantasy compiled each year by the World Science Fiction Society and considered the premier accolade of the genre — was an achievement years in the making.

When news broke that Archive of Our Own, an online fanfiction site run by non-profit Organization for Transformative Works, earned a finalist spot for Best Related Work, even longtime readers of the site wondered how the a repository for sci-fi and fantasy fic could qualify for the award. Founded in 2008, and opened to the public a year later, Archive of Our Own — known in shorthand as AO3 — was a destination for fictional remixing, mostly by impassioned amateurs. The Hugos were the preeminent awards for science-fiction and fantasy literature. The nomination felt like vindication, even as it blew many unsuspecting fic writers and readers back in their chairs.

Why AO3? Why now? According to those with ties to the site, the nomination is the result of five years of steady campaigning to help spread the word. The efforts to snag a finalist spot for Archive of Our Own reflect the platform’s own creation, and the legacy it has since generated in the fandom world.

Archive of Our Own’s legacy in fandom

Anyone floating around “fandom” culture from the early 2010s onward has likely navigated to AO3 — standing out as an always-bustling, foundational hub — but the site’s history speaks to the uphill climb for fans to come together to create something of, well, their own.

In 2007, a site called FanLib aimed to monetize fanworks. The site partnered with different copyright owners to host events, but submitting fics to the site meant forfeiting rights to the work and allowing it to be used for commercial purposes. If you wrote a Star Trek fic, for example, it could be lifted and used in a show without compensation. FanLib’s entirely male staff drew criticism, since fanfiction, in both reputation and fact, was and continues to be predominantly written by women. This also came around the time of LiveJournal’s first content purges, which began to censor LGBTQ communities and fan content.

In 2007, The Organization for Transformative Works founding member Naomi Novik, now a published fantasy author, made a post on her then-anonymous LiveJournal urging for an “Archive of Our Own,” paying homage to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. A LiveJournal community sprouted out of the suggestion. Initially dubbed FanArchive, the group would evolved into the Organization for Transformative Works. The domain name was registered in May 2007.

The project propagated in true internet fashion. The founding members of OTW recruited programmers proficient in Ruby on Rails and began to create the site. AO3’s closed beta opened in 2008, and its open beta in November 2009, with an official opening on Dec. 18, 2009. By Dec. 24, it boasted 4648 fandoms, 33,810 works and 4127 users.

Around the same time, other sites followed LiveJournal’s push for censorship by restricting the themes and images of fic. Fanfiction.net prohibited M-rated fics in 2012. Many users missing LiveJournal’s social platform migrated to Tumblr and Twitter. For a place to read and write fanfiction, they went to AO3.

While not explicitly a community — the OTW describes their work as an archive first and foremost — AO3 has carved out its own online social service niche. The site’s intricate tagging and content curation system, focus on its users, and ease of navigation make it a shining example of feminist Human Computer Interaction (feminist HCI), according to assistant professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder Casey Fieseler. Feminist HCI is a subset of Human Computer Interaction focused on building interactions that focus on equality, pluralism, participation and advocacy.

These days, AO3 boasts almost 2 million users and 4.7 million works of fanfiction. The entire site remains free to use, with no ads or monetization, and is run on donations and volunteer efforts.

The road to Hugo Award Finalist

Archive of Our Own’s spot on the Hugo finalists list is the culmination of a half-decade’s worth of persistence and hard work. Hugo Administrator Nicholas Whyte noted that AO3 had been on the longlist for a nomination several times — and the archive’s qualifications had never been in question.

“It’s on the record that Archive of Our Own was nominated, but did not qualify for the final ballot on several previous occasions (notably last year, where it missed a place on the ballot by the slimmest of margins),” writes Whyte in an email to Polygon.

The idea to nominate AO3 for the Hugo Awards started in 2013. OTW volunteer member and chair of volunteering and recruiting Renay (a username she maintains on Twitter and AO3) had been following the Hugo Awards since 2008. Back then, she said, the awards took a pre-internet approach to science-fiction/fantasy and fandom communities.

“I wanted to see more of the things I loved represented,” she told Polygon in a Twitter DM.

In 2013, she took a look at the long list of nominations for Best Related work, the Hugo Award category that essentially covers the miscellaneous works that don’t fall under prose.

“[I] saw such a diverse mix of items, paired with the rules for Best Related Work: ‘is either non-fiction or noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text,’” Renay said. “Archive of Our Own exists because a group of fans [...] decided that it was time to stop getting knocked around by the folks buying up the sites we lived on and running us underground or sometimes off of them. And they built a multi-million dollar website to do it, and they’ve been maintaining it for a decade plus. That’s the kind of thing the Hugo Award seems fit to recognize and reward — fan ingenuity.”

Renay pointed this out to a group of her friends, and a campaign to snag the nomination began. Slowly, more and more eligible voters, all members of the World Science Fiction Society, began to take notice. Part of the voting process involves a master, crowdsourced spreadsheet created each year, used to let voters know what works were eligible. Advocates of the archive made the push there.

“We put AO3 on it every single year, blogged about it while that was still a thing that people did, and reminded people on Twitter,” said Renay. “It helped us get it in front of people who we didn’t know, which is how we finally got over the top.”

An anonymous voter told Polygon that he voted for AO3 this year — and would’ve done so in previous years if he knew the platform was eligible.

“I think it’s an incredibly impressive achievement,” he told Polygon. “It also exemplifies the spirit of the Hugo Awards. It’s something that the community came together to build.”

Each year, AO3 climbed higher and higher on the list, until Archive of Our Own finally earned a spot in Best Related Work.

The Hugo Awards guidelines delineates Best Related Work as:

Awarded to a work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year. The type of works eligible include, but are not limited to, collections of art, works of literary criticism, books about the making of a film or TV series, biographies and so on, provided that they do not qualify for another category. Specifically, the Constitution says that any work in this category must be “either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and which is not eligible in any other category.” Nonfiction collections are eligible here, but fiction anthologies generally are not because all of the individual works within the anthology are eligible in one of the “story” categories. There is no category for “Best Anthology.”

The 10-year-old Archive Of Our Own maintains eligibility for the Hugo’s because “AO3’s continual evolution makes it eligible for this annual award,” reads the Organization for Transformative Works’ blog post on the matter.

Many online have joked about how the nomination means that their fanfiction — be it sweet fluff, alternate universe adventures, or hardcore smut — is now a Hugo Award finalist. According to the minutiae on the Hugo Award guidelines, however, this isn’t quite the case: It is the entirety of Archive of Our Own as a project, “noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional texts,” that qualifies as a finalist and not the individual works of fanfiction.

“The shortlisting of AO3 does not mean that every work published on the site is a Hugo Award finalist,” clarified Kevin Standlee, a member of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, to Polygon. “By analogy, if a magazine is nominated for Best Semiprozine, it does not mean that every work and every author published during that year’s run of the magazine is a Hugo Award finalist.”

Whyte also emphasized that Archive of Our Own as a project met all the requirements of the Best Related Work category as far as the Hugo administrators were concerned.

“Archive of our Own as a project is on the Hugo final ballot,” Whyte wrote in an email. “A substantial number of voters supported it, and it is not really the role of the Hugo administrators to second-guess or interpret their intentions. Our job is to determine whether it qualifies under the rules. We considered the precedents in this and other categories very carefully, and found no good reason to disqualify it.”

Archive of Our Own is a platform for fanfiction, yes, but it is also an intricate system of archiving and hosting said fanfiction, as well as a space built up by fandom members for their very own. No “one part” of AO3 qualifies the site for the prize. The entirety — past, present, and promise to the future — makes it uniquely primed for the honor.

“So if the question is, which of that work is the nomination recognizing?” penned Naomi Novik on her Tumblr. “It’s recognizing all of it. You can’t separate one part of it from the other. The garden wouldn’t exist without all of it. And I am grateful for it all.”